In Which I Use the Word Chonmage

I’m digging through some of my Internet finds I’ve tagged as ‘inspirational’. Let’s see if I can do the creative thing. I’ve subjected all of us to to much blather this past week.

I’m going to riff off this illustration I found back in July or so I guess. I’ve reduced the picture from original size and provided links per my normal habit. Appending the actual illustration to this post rather than just a link is new for me since maybe the first 50 posts when I decided not to. I worried that doing so distracted me from my writing, I didn’t want to unduly influence a reader’s judgment of my writing, and I worried about infringing on copyrights.

Since my readers and I will work out the first two issues together I should make a note to Bobby Chui of Imaginism Studios, the artist (and any artist I may display or link to), that I’ve shrunk the image as much as I thought reasonable to cover (my interpretation of) fair use and provided credit links in as many places as seem reasonable. If I need to pull or shrink, just shoot me a note. I’ll get a man on it.

Oh, and Streetfighter as a game or reference or whatever means nothing to me. Long time readers will recall when I wrote something inspired by an artist’s pin-up of some other game character and I didn’t realize till later.

“You don’t know what you like; you know when you like it,” Tarô said as he pulled a stretchy-cuffed black leather hoodie from a hanger.

“That Confucius?” Boot asked.

“Don’t be petulant Boot. My Mom says that,” Tarô answered. The 140 kilo seventeen year old shuffled into a jacket the size some would spread across a bed and snapped it up.

“Small?”

“No. Just right.”

“Hood’ll fukup your chonmage.”

“I’m not gonna pull the hood on. And you’re in a shit mood today Boot. Why’d you come with me in first place.”

Boot shrugged his shoulders and said, “Fukif.” Saliva spattered from his left tusk then strung to the floor before he wiped it away with the back of his claw. He scuffed the drool that made it to the floor into the carpet with the sole of his docksiders. Tarô rolled his eyes. Boot shrugged his shoulders again.

“Shit happens,” Draper says to his two short friends.

“God shit Draper!” Boot jumped to the side and cracked his head on the clothing rack. “Quit fukin sneakin up on us. Bad enough I have to stare at your junk all day.” He rubbed the knot forming on his green-skinned skull.

Draper mirrored Boot’s movement across his own head more out of habit than empathy, but still a little of the later. His ‘fro-stripes always itched on real humid days–Houston’s air was a muggy wall out there today. “Two and a half meters and a hundred kilos means all I can do is sneak up.”